Earlier this year, the Middle School Building Committee in North Haven, Connecticut, voted unanimously to install two new artificial-turf fields at a cost of more than $2 million. After a series of public meetings, some phone calls to experts, and a little debate, the committee had decided the easy maintenance of artificial turf outweighed the alleged but unproven health risks for students who play on it. Just in case, committee members opted for the less controversial encapsulated crumb-rubber infill over the traditional crumb rubber option.

“I felt confident that the material had been studied many times, in many different places, in many different ways and it was a safe material,” Gary Johns, the committee’s chair, told me last month.

But some parents in town weren’t convinced. Amanda Gabriele had heard of a supposed link between crumb rubber and cancer and became increasingly concerned the more she read about the infill material. Soon after the fields were approved, she—along with fellow parent Danielle Morfi and others—launched an organization called North Haven Against Shredded Tire Infill and demanded the town reconsider its decision to install a synthetic surface. Since then, Gabriele and Morfi say, NHASTI members have been told to move, sent nasty messages on social media, scorned at public meetings, and glared at in public. And they’ve gotten nowhere in stopping the artificial-turf fields. “Our concerns,” Gabriele said, “have fallen on not only deaf ears but also aggressive ears.”

Cathy Bussewitz / AP

More than 8,000 artificial-turf surfaces are currently in use across America, from youth sports fields to professional stadiums, according to the Synthetic Turf Council. The fields are durable, rain-resistant, and low-maintenance, and their sleek designs appeal to young athletes and their parents. But in recent years, some researchers have raised concerns about the safety of these surfaces and their infills, which are typically made from scrap tires, causing parents like Gabriele to agonize over the fields’ impact on kids’ health.

There is no scientific consensus on the risks of artificial turf. Some researchers are sure crumb rubber is poisoning the children who come in contact with it. Others suggest that concern is little more than media-driven hysteria. Still others believe it’s too early to say for sure. The federal government has commissioned a study to address the mystery, but results could be years away.

Though some advocates have suggested a moratorium on crumb-rubber fields until the science crystallizes, the surfaces keep sprouting up across the country. That means towns and school districts like North Haven are deciding whether to install artificial turf without knowing for certain if they risk poisoning their children by doing so.

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Artificial turf first entered the national spotlight in 1966, when it was installed at the Astrodome, then the brand-new home of Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros. Versions of that original AstroTurf surface soon spread throughout professional baseball, until about a third of the 30 MLB teams played on artificial surfaces. By the time natural grass returned to favor in baseball during the 1990s and 2000s due to pushback from players, synthetic turf had spread to football fields and soccer pitches—not only at the professional level but also in youth and college sports. The fields were expensive to install but could be cheaper to maintain than natural grass if managed properly. As children played more and more sports and fields were forced to withstand more and more wear, towns saw artificial turf as a sensible investment.

Researchers have examined numerous potential dangers of synthetic turf, from increased concussion risk to overheating in the summer to spikes in ACL tears and staph infections. But the concern that has garnered the most attention is the unproven but nevertheless alarming link between crumb-rubber infill—the granular used-tire material that serves as cushioning on synthetic turf—and cancer.

Crumb rubber emerged in the early 2000s as a softer, bouncier alternative to previous generations of artificial turf, while serving as a convenient way for the tire industry to dispose of waste material. Soon, it was a regular part of not only turf fields but also playgrounds across the country.

The idea of filling children’s fields and playgrounds with tire waste raised alarm among researchers almost immediately, but the crumb-rubber debate didn’t hit the mainstream until 2014, when NBC News reported on a suspicious cancer cluster in Washington state. A local college-soccer coach, Amy Griffin, had observed that numerous players, particularly goalkeepers, had come down with blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia after playing on surfaces with crumb-rubber infills. She theorized that the black bits of scrap tire the players were constantly diving into (not to mention inhaling or even swallowing) were causing them to get sick.

“There are problems with synthetic turf, but I have no problem with my kids, my grandkids playing on it.”

But this past January, the Washington State Department of Health published a study suggesting that the rate of cancer among Griffin’s players was comparable to that for Washington state as a whole. The study concluded that there was currently no evidence that crumb rubber contained enough carcinogenic chemicals to endanger those who play on it, while leaving the door open for future research to the contrary.

Elaine Thompson / AP

As the director of Penn State’s Center for Sports Surface Research, Andrew McNitt has reviewed and conducted extensive research on synthetic turf. He cautions that the surfaces can overheat on hot days and become dangerously hard if not properly maintained. But he simply hasn’t seen evidence to support claims about cancer. “There are problems with synthetic turf, but I have no problem with my kids, my grandkids playing on it,” he told me. “Crumb rubber is really not a concern to me.”

(McNitt’s center is underwritten by FieldTurf, an artificial turf company, but he says he has no contractual relationship with the firm, that he has been funded throughout his career by both synthetic- and natural-turf interests and that his loyalty is, above all, to the truth. The arrangement underscores how difficult it can be to tease out industry’s role in shaping the conversation about turf.)

But plenty of researchers and advocates disagree entirely with McNitt’s view of artificial turf. Nancy Alderman, the president of Environment and Human Health, Inc., a nonprofit environmental-health advocacy group, insists the crumb-rubber debate is far from settled. She refers to a letter written by the EHHI toxicologist David Brown and the Brown University professor emeritus Richard W. Clapp that claims the state of Washington presented “invalid and misleading” calculations, failed to account for length of exposure and latency period of cancer, and misrepresented its scope.

In fact, Alderman says the EHHI will soon release a report poking holes in nearly two dozen studies that failed to find danger in synthetic-turf fields. For affirmative evidence that artificial surfaces are treacherous, she cites a 2015 EHHI/Yale study that found 96 chemicals in crumb-rubber fields—half of which had never been tested by the government and 12 of which were known carcinogens—and posits that those figures alone should scare districts away from synthetic turf. (Others would argue that the presence of carcinogens doesn’t alone constitute a danger as long as the quantity is not too high.)

Alderman, who spoke at a school-board meeting in North Haven earlier this year, feels that even the encapsulated crumb rubber the town plans to install comes with issues. The material, she notes, has never been suitably tested; she worries that, with enough wear, the plastic coating could break down to expose the potentially hazardous crumb rubber. “Our position has always been—and it has not changed—that there is no safer material for students, athletes, and children to play on than grass,” she said.

“Isn’t the onus on them to prove to me that it’s safe, instead of on me to prove to them that it’s dangerous?”

Uncertainty about the safety of artificial-turf fields was the impetus for the ongoing federal-government study, which was announced in February 2016, after Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, and Bill Nelson, of Florida, called for the Obama administration to initiate a review of the issue. “There are serious and alarming questions that need to be answered,” Blumenthal said recently in a phone interview. “There has been research on both sides, and the point is to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has an official responsibility, determine the safety and health effects.”

But with a new administration in office, Blumenthal said he’s not confident the study will become public too soon. “I have no clear sense of what the deadline may be,” he said. According to a spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is involved in the study, “EPA and CDC/ATSDR are currently visiting a small number of fields to collect exposure information to better characterize people’s exposure to tire crumbs. A peer-reviewed report summarizing study results will be published as soon as possible after the exposure characterization part of the study concludes.”

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Gabriele views the crumb-rubber issue as deeply personal. When she was pregnant with her daughter Alice, now 7, she worked in a factory that produced trophies featuring plates made from used tires. After Alice was born and diagnosed with a condition called craniosynostosis—which causes abnormal skull growth and can affect brain development—doctors theorized that Gabriele’s exposure to the tire waste might have been to blame.

“We’re not typically conservative people, but we’ve been beside a hospital bed, we’ve seen our kid hooked up to tubes,” she explained one afternoon last month, wiping away tears as she sat alongside her husband Tim in her North Haven backyard, with the couple’s two kids playing on the swing set behind them. “I’ll be conservative all day over that.”

Gabriele’s position on artificial turf is simple: It’s not worth the risk. She wonders how easier maintenance could ever justify an expensive surface that can increase ACL tears, concussions, and staph infections; overheat dangerously; and potentially release elevated levels of carcinogens into the air her kids breathe. To her, even the suggestion of a link to cancer makes the risk unwise. “Isn’t the onus on them to prove to me that it’s safe, instead of on me to prove to them that it’s dangerous?” she said.

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Presented with this argument, the North Haven Middle School Building Committee’s Johns was unmoved, citing the science that informed his group’s decision. “We’re trying to provide athletic facilities that are up to the standards of other towns,” he said.

The artificial-turf fields in North Haven are under construction now and will be ready for use by November. Gabriele and her allies have filed a petition asking for a town meeting at which residents would vote on whether to delay installation until the federal-government study is complete or to choose a new infill for the fields. If that petition is denied, Gabriele says she will reluctantly file a writ of mandamus, asking a judge to compel North Haven to grant a town meeting.

As an example of their hopes for North Haven, Gabriele points to the school system in Martha’s Vineyard, just off the coast of Cape Cod, which last spring scuttled a plan for artificial-turf fields and instead invested in more attentive maintenance for its natural-grass fields.* North Haven, however, remains stubborn.

Gabriele is currently running for the school board, while Morfi, her fellow anti-turf crusader, is pursuing a spot on the finance board. The two parents say they will fight against the artificial-turf fields for as long as the town uses them. But come next month, the children of North Haven will be rolling around in crumb rubber, whether it is safe for them to do so or not.

*This article originally stated that the school system in Martha's Vineyard invested in "better" drainage for its natural-grass fields. We regret the error.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

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The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”